Duke Ellington’s 1927 debut at Harlem’s Cotton Club has long been positioned as a landmark moment in his career. During his initial four-year tenure at the club, the bandleader’s orchestra rose to national and then international fame. Throughout this period, the growing critical and public interest in Ellington was fueled by both the ever-increasing brilliance of his compositions and his incomparable orchestra, as well as the innovative promotional strategies of his manager, Irving Mills. The building blocks for this unique career, though, were formed in the musical and cultural contexts of Ellington’s youth in Washington, D.C.; in his early years as a sideman and bandleader in both Washington and New York; and especially in his educational immersion in the world of Harlem entertainment.

Edward Kennedy (“Duke”) Ellington was born in April 1899 and raised in a loving, middle-class household in Washington’s thriving African-American community. In Ellington’s youth, Washington had the largest black population of any city in the country, and his racial pride and strong self-image were greatly shaped by the mores of this city’s significant black middle- and upper-class communities. His Washington years also laid the foundations of his growth and interests as a musician and composer.

Ellington’s family had a passion for music, and he loved to listen to his mother, Daisy, play hymns and light-classical / parlor pieces at the piano, including such favorites as C. S. Morrison’s 1896 “Meditation” and Ethelbert Nevin’s 1898 “The Rosary.” Ellington’s father, James Edward (known as “J. E.”), played both piano and guitar by ear, and favored opera arias and popular songs of the day.¹ When young Edward was around seven or eight, Daisy arranged for him to take piano lessons with a Mrs. Marietta Clinkscales, but as Ellington later noted, “At this point, piano was not my recognized talent.”²He was also exposed to black church music traditions, with his father attending the local African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, and his mother attending a Baptist denomination. In both, Ellington heard a range of popular hymns and spirituals, such as “Abide With Me” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”³ This music was quite important to him and richly informed his later extended compositions, such as Black, Brown and Beige (1943) and his three Sacred Concerts (1965, 1968, and 1973), as well as numerous smaller works.

Ellington liked to joke that he had two educations – one in the pool hall, and one in school.⁴ In Frank Holliday’s poolroom, he was able to observe a cross-section of Washington’s diverse African-American community and to overhear both talented pianists and conversations between “the prime authorities on every subject.”⁵ By the time he was 13 or 14, Ellington had begun to seek out performances by many of the region’s talented ragtime pianists. Of particular importance was a family vacation in the summer of 1913 to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where he was impressed by a young pianist, Harvey Brooks, who taught Ellington a number of elementary ragtime techniques. After this, Ellington was greatly inspired to return to learning the piano. He later said, “I played by ear then,” but acknowledged that he “couldn’t begin to play the tunes” of the pianists he admired.⁶ At the same time, he worked at a soda fountain called the Poodle Dog Cafe. When the cafe needed a new pianist, Ellington offered his services, but quickly realized that “the only way I could learn how to play a tune was to compose it myself and work it up.”⁷ Ellington thus wrote his first composition, Soda Fountain Rag (a.k.a. Poodle Dog Rag), and this creative act was intimately entwined with both necessity and his performance aspirations. Other ragtime-influenced piano compositions followed, including What You Gonna Do When the Bed Breaks Down? (1913) and Bitches’ Ball (1914). As the Ellington scholar Mark Tucker has noted, early works like Soda Fountain Rag were not fully composed, “set” compositions but instead “consist[ed] of a few musical ideas that serve[d] as a basis for improvised elaboration.” The young pianist regularly adapted such materials in new combinations, tempos, rhythms, and styles. In this period Ellington acquired his nickname, “The Duke,” when a friend remarked on his elegant clothes and noble demeanor. After he was goaded into playing a number at a dance, Ellington also discovered that “When you were playing piano there was always a pretty girl standing at … the end of the piano.”⁸ Though he was training to become a commercial artist as he began high school in 1913–1914, Ellington had found the key inspirations for his ultimate career as a composer-musician.

The Washington experiences that left the greatest impact on his growth as a musician were the lessons he learned – both directly and through observation – from the city’s pianists. In addition, as Tucker has noted, Ellington found lifelong artistic and professional inspiration in the city’s black historical pageants, the elder professional musicians who encouraged his early bandleading endeavors, and the so-called “Washington pattern” of black composer-bandleaders.⁹ This “pattern” involved the pursuit of multifaceted careers (as bandleaders, performers, composers, and songwriters), a professional demeanor that commanded cross-racial respect, and the active promotion of black vernacular idioms through original compositions. Tucker points to the older musician-bandleaders Will Marion Cook, James Reese Europe, and Ford Dabney – all central figures in both New York and Washington entertainment across Ellington’s youth – as the three most likely career models for the aspiring pianist-composer. Following this “Washington pattern” across his career, Ellington pursued a diverse creative life that spanned work as a pianist and bandleader, work in musical theater and nightclub revues, and the composition of vernacular-based concert works.

Among the many musicians Ellington knew in his teens, the two most important were Oliver “Doc” Perry and Henry Grant. Both were generous, intelligent, “conservatory” musicians who took an interest in Ellington and impressed him with their deep respect for both formal (classically trained) and vernacular (“the cats who played by ear”) musicians. Perry, a ragtime pianist whom Ellington called his “piano parent,” taught the young pianist rudimentary ragtime and popular-music score-reading skills and chord theory.¹⁰ Grant taught music at Ellington’s high school and generously gave him private lessons in harmony, a gesture which the budding musician later felt “lighted the direction to more highly developed composition.”¹¹ Ellington’s associations with such supportive, older musicians also led to performance opportunities that set him on track for a career in music rather than art.

These early piano jobs further awakened his skills as a businessman, and a notable lesson came during a job as a substitute pianist for a socialite party. Though Ellington provided the actual entertainment, the original pianist, to Ellington’s amazement, still collected 90 percent of this engagement’s $100 fee. As he recalled, “the very next day” he “arranged for a Music-for-All-Occasions ad in the telephone book,” and Ellington-the-entrepreneur was born.¹² His entertainment agency provided both music – which led to the formation of his first band – and advertisement, with Ellington creating posters to advertise events.

In his autobiography, Ellington remarks that in his Washington youth “it was New York that filled our imagination. We were awed by the never-ending roll of great talents there … in society music and blues, in vaudeville and songwriting, in jazz and theatre, in dancing and comedy.” He adds that “Harlem … [had] the world’s most glamorous atmosphere. We had to go there.”¹³ Ellington further recounts a long list of Harlem’s entertainers as well as its famous nightclubs, ballrooms, and theaters. While he and his Washington friends were deeply entranced by the seductive folklore of black Harlem, across their teenage years in the 1910s, this world was only just coming into being.

In a 1925 essay, the famous African-American author James Weldon Johnson notes that, in the 1890s, “the center of [Manhattan’s] colored population had shifted to the upper Twenties and lower Thirties west of Sixth Avenue.” Johnson adds that the black population moved again in the next decade, this time up to an area around West 53rd Street.¹⁴It was during this latter era that New York’s African-American entertainment traditions first took shape in a variety of stage productions. The black pioneers in Broadway musical theater, the nascent recording industry, and the later dance band industry of the 1910s emerged around the West Indian-born comic Bert Williams and his vaudeville partner George Walker. In late 1897, the young composer-violinist (and former Washingtonian) Will Marion Cook approached Williams and Walker with the idea of mounting an all-black musical called Clorindy, or, The Origin of the Cakewalk. Cook’s hour-long show opened – without Williams and Walker, due to a prior engagement – in July 1898 at the Casino Theatre Roof Garden on Broadway at 39th Street. This production sparked an African-American entertainment renaissance that produced a decade-plus string of all-black musical theater hits. Another member of the Williams-Walker creative team was Will Vodery, who shared duties as musical director, composer, and arranger with Cook. The successes of Williams, Walker, Cook, and Vodery were not alone. In particular, James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, in partnership with the performer Bob Cole and the conductor James Reese Europe, mounted serious competition.

Ellington was greatly impressed by the business acumen, cross-racial success, and race-oriented artistry of both Cook and Vodery. He gratefully acknowledged on numerous occasions that across the 1920s both men generously provided him with professional advice as well as “valuable” informal lessons in harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. Even though the precise nature of these “lessons” is unknown, Cook and Vodery were undeniably important professional friends, role models, and mentors for the young composer across his early years in New York. Ellington’s emergence as a Washington bandleader in the mid-teens was also shaped by the broader cultural influence of these older musicians.

In 1910, black Broadway’s core members formed the Clef Club, the premier New York booking agency and trade union for black musicians. With James Reese Europe as its president, the Clef Club was at the forefront of providing music for a major dancing craze that ran from 1913 to 1919. Though black stage productions on Broadway waned during the mid-to-late teens, these syncopated orchestras maintained a prominent presence of black performers in white entertainment venues up through 1919. This white market demand for black bands spread to other cities with major African-American communities, including Washington, and provided many young musicians with opportunities both to perform in, and join, established ensembles, and to organize their own dance bands. Ellington was active in both areas, but even during this period of his growing success, he had his sights set on New York.

Ellington’s star-struck impression of black New York was centrally tied to Harlem’s rise as the epicenter of the black entertainment community. This uptown relocation came at the end of 1913, when Europe and other musicians broke from the Clef Club to found the Tempo Club, a second black booking agency. Whereas the Clef Club was based in Midtown, the Tempo Club was founded in Harlem. This shift was central to the birth of Harlem entertainment proper, and paralleled the influx of African Americans into this neighborhood. New York’s top all-black and mixed-race nightclubs similarly moved up to Harlem across the mid-to-late teens.

Ellington’s first personal encounter with the world of Harlem entertainment came in Washington in November 1921, after a friend dared him to play his rendition of the Harlem pianist James P. Johnson’s virtuosic composition Carolina Shout for Johnson himself. Johnson was impressed, and became a friend and supporter of the young pianist. Through similar Washington encounters, Ellington began to associate with other key New York musicians.

New York’s black entertainment renaissance of the 1920s took root on Broadway stages following the immense success of the 1921 all-black musical Shuffle Along, by the stage duo of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, along with the pianist Eubie Blake and his singing partner, Noble Sissle. This production was the catalyst for a second wave of all-black musicals across the 1920s. While Shuffle Along’s success increased white interest in black entertainment in Harlem, fashionable white audiences had ventured up to Harlem’s black cabarets from the very beginnings of the community’s nightclub scene in the mid-1910s. It was in this earlier period that a celebrated virtuosic piano tradition took shape in and around Harlem’s new nightclubs. By the early 1920s, James P. Johnson was the chief exponent of this early jazz idiom, which was known as stride piano. Johnson’s 1918 and 1921 piano rolls of Carolina Shout laid the foundations of jazz piano for a generation of pianists – including Ellington – who learned the work note-for-note from these rolls.

Despite the rising profile of Harlem nightlife, several major setbacks for New York’s black entertainment community occurred in the late teens. First, the 1917 New York arrival of the (white) Original Dixieland Jazz Band (the “ODJB”) marked the beginning of a nationwide white interest in jazz-related music (as distinct from ragtime). Shortly thereafter, a group of arrangement-heavy, white dance bands rose to prominence and began to distance themselves from the rough-edged, New Orleans-style, improvised “hot” jazz of the many bands that followed the ODJB model. These “sweet” dance orchestras included the bands of Art Hickman and Paul Whiteman, among others. An important turning point in the racial makeup of New York’s music scene occurred in 1919 when the Hickman ensemble displaced the black orchestra of Ford Dabney (a Clef Club member) at theater impresario Florenz Ziegfeld’s Broadway roof garden restaurant. After this, there were still a number of smaller Midtown/Broadway nightclubs and dance halls that featured black jazz-oriented bands. By the early 1920s, Harlem nightclubs began to feature both small bands and the aforementioned piano performers. Within time, these bands were also backing ever more elaborate floorshow revues. By the mid-1920s, many of these nightclub revues aspired to be just as lavish as their Broadway stage counterparts, and this ambition led to larger orchestras and the rise of black big band jazz. This is the precise context of Ellington’s rise to fame.

Ellington first traveled to New York in February 1923. He and his friends, drummer Sonny Greer and saxophonist Otto Hardwick, had been hired as backing musicians for the clarinetist Wilbur Sweatman’s engagement at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre. During their short stint with Sweatman, Greer, Hardwick, and Ellington circulated among Harlem’s entertainment community, and most particularly James P. Johnson’s social circle. Ellington was soon introduced to several musicians who later joined his first New York bands, including trumpeter James “Bubber” Miley and trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton. After their money and gigs ran out, Greer, Hardwick, and Ellington headed back to Washington. By the summer of 1923, however, they returned with the band of banjoist Elmer Snowden. After several minor fiascos and a spot of good luck, Snowden’s band landed a prime spot at Barron’s Exclusive Club up in Harlem. While Ellington largely played for dancers at Barron’s, he had the opportunity to work as a rehearsal pianist for the Connie’s Inn revues (also in Harlem), an engagement that launched his education on the workings of Harlem’s burgeoning musical revue tradition. By late summer, he had also partnered with the lyricist Jo Trent in a new songwriting venture. In the fall of 1923, Snowden’s orchestra relocated to the Hollywood Club (on 49th Street near Broadway), a small Midtown venue popular among white musicians and Broadway celebrities. Ellington quickly assumed control of the band, and the venue’s name changed not long after to the Kentucky Club. The Washingtonians, as they were called, soon began to develop a more “hot” sound with the addition of such new band members as Miley and Nanton.

Ellington’s early, pre-Cotton Club compositional efforts from this period ideally reflect the entire breadth of mid-1920s black entertainment trends. Through his partnership with Trent, Ellington hoped to break into the lucrative songwriting business of black Tin Pan Alley. The composer was indeed quickly befriended by such influential black songwriters as Maceo Pinkard. Pinkard notably arranged for the Washingtonians’ first recording session, which included such early Ellington-penned instrumental compositions as Rainy Nights and the train-themed Choo Choo.¹⁵ While fairly routine fare for the day, these early recordings do exhibit small innovative details – and the distinctive instrumental voices of his band members – that were later transformed into hallmarks of Ellington’s work for the Cotton Club. With this future in mind, it should be noted that the Trent-Ellington partnership contributed several songs – such as “Jim Dandy,” “Jig Walk: Charleston,” and “Deacon Jazz” – to a new stage revue, Chocolate Kiddies. This production was meant to emulate the success of two earlier nightclub revues, the 1922 Plantation Revue and the 1922–1923 Plantation Days, both of which went on to Broadway stage runs and lucrative European tours (Chocolate Kiddies only accomplished the latter). Ellington was equally successful in the dance band realm, and during this initial foray to New York, his Washingtonians even entered the nascent medium of radio through local broadcasts from the Kentucky Club. The band additionally began to pursue vaudeville work. In sum, these various career developments illustrate Ellington’s growing abilities to navigate the increasingly fluid boundaries between dance bands, Tin Pan Alley song publishing, the record industry, radio, and New York nightclub and stage entertainments.

In mid-to-late 1926, Ellington began his professional association with Irving Mills, a well-connected white music publisher, impresario, and talent manager.¹⁶ Together they built the Ellington orchestra into one of the top dance orchestras of the day, black or white. Through his diligent and persistent promotion of the bandleader across the late 1920s and 1930s, Mills was able to advance Ellington’s career up a ladder of ever more prestigious accomplishments. The end goal of these efforts can be seen in Mills’s 1930s advertising manuals, which boldly demand that promoters “sell Ellington as a great artist, [and] a musical genius whose unique style and individual theories of harmony have created a new music.”¹⁷ This “musical genius” image had its roots in Ellington’s early years with Mills, over 1926 and 1927, when the bandleader was finding his unique voice as a composer. This individuality partially emerged in a number of mid-1926 recordings, but it is with the November 1926 recordings of such instrumental compositions as East St. Louis Toodle-O and Birmingham Breakdown – and especially the April 1927 Black and Tan Fantasy – that his characteristic early voice as an orchestral jazz composer fully blossomed. Notably, these arrangements were recorded more than half a year before these same numbers became cornerstones for the exotic sound of his Cotton Club “jungle music.”

In October 1927, the Ellington orchestra joined the Lafayette Theatre’s Jazzmania stage revue. It was this engagement that caught the attention of the songwriter Jimmy McHugh, who was busy developing a new floorshow revue at the Cotton Club in Harlem. At the encouragement of McHugh (who had ties to Mills), Ellington and his band were hired as the club’s new orchestra. As the story goes, the Cotton Club’s gangster associates freed Ellington from a conflicting contract by telling a theater owner to “be big or you’ll be dead.”¹⁸

With his employment at the Cotton Club, Ellington had moved to the epicenter of 1920s Harlem entertainment. The club’s regular radio broadcasts – which were primarily features for the band – soon spread the bandleader’s music and name across the country.¹⁹ For the club’s glamorous revues, he contributed band arrangements for songs by the club’s white composing staff as well as his own distinctive compositions as instrumental background music for select show numbers. The band additionally provided music for dancing. Ellington’s new Cotton Club fame led to national and international tours for the band, work in various Broadway and Hollywood musical productions, and many other high-profile opportunities.

Like Cook’s and Vodery’s work in the teens, Ellington’s Cotton Club-era compositions and arrangements drew unusual cross-race critical praise for his abilities as a “serious” composer working in popular entertainment. From the late 1920s forward, this critical literature routinely positioned the 1926 and 1927 recordings of East St. Louis Toodle-O and Black and Tan Fantasy as both watershed moments for the bandleader and the first true expressions of his unique voice as a composer. These compositions represent ideal early examples of the “Ellington Effect,” to borrow the famous phrase coined by Ellington’s later writing partner Billy Strayhorn. In this expression, Strayhorn meant to capture both Ellington’s habit of composing and orchestrating specifically for the unique musical talents of his band members, and the distinctive greater whole that was produced when these individual instrumental voices sounded together in the performance of his compositions.²⁰ Both of these early compositions also immerse the listener in the haunting “jungle music” idiom of the Cotton Club era. As heard in these two compositions, the “jungle” idiom owed a great deal to the combination of Ellington’s orchestrations, the collective expression and instrumental voices of his performers, and, most especially, the growl-and-plunger brass contributions of Miley (who was credited as a co-composer on both numbers) and Nanton.

When the critic R. D. Darrell first reviewed the April 1927 Brunswick record of Black and Tan Fantasy, he commented on its “amazing eccentric instrumental effects,” emphasizing that such “stunts” were “performed musically, even artistically.”²¹ Five years later, Darrell noted that in this first listening he “laughed like everyone else over [the recording’s] instrumental wa-waing … But as I continued to play the record … I laughed less heartily … In my ears the whinnies and wa-was began to resolve into new tone colors, distorted and tortured, but agonizingly expressive.”²² This transformation in Darrell’s view of Black and Tan Fantasy – from “novelty” record to a more culturally elevated “composition” – ultimately laid a major foundation for later critical arguments that held jazz to be an art. This early Ellington criticism – which often provocatively compared Ellington’s rich “orchestral technique” to the music of such classical composers as Igor Stravinsky and Frederick Delius, among others – was quickly recycled as promotional fodder by Mills Artists to reinforce Ellington’s growing public image as a “respected” composer. The English critic Constant Lambert’s 1934 book, Music Ho!, also played a major role in the journalistic reception of Ellington as a “serious composer.” Lambert notably states here that Ellington “is a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction.”²³ In a related trend, from the late 1920s onwards, there were regular press accounts of Ellington’s social and professional encounters with classical musicians – such as his widely reported 1932 invitation from the noted composer Percy Grainger to have the Ellington band perform in a lecture-demonstration in Grainger’s New York University music appreciation class. With such favorable publicity, Ellington’s music came to be positioned as the very definition of new, culturally elevated “jazz composition.”

As Tucker has argued, the originality of a number like East St. Louis Toodle-O was only achieved after Ellington’s “long experience playing Tin Pan Alley pop songs, hot jazz numbers, and the blues.” In finding his own voice, he “had evoked a style that drew upon all these genres, as well as African-American folk music, both secular and sacred … But in a way, even before setting foot in the Cotton Club door, Duke Ellington had arrived.”²⁴ As Tucker further emphasizes, the bandleader’s early years at the Cotton Club formed the “final important phase of his musical education” through his on-the-job immersion in the production processes of the club’s floorshow revues.

Early and mid-century highbrow–lowbrow cultural rhetoric regularly insisted upon rigid distinctions between the spheres of art and entertainment, with the former field retaining great cultural privilege and status, and the vast latter arena being typically viewed (from above) as a cultural wasteland. What is unusual in early Ellington criticism is the readiness of his proponents to characterize him as a “real composer” and to compare his arrangements and compositions to the work of revered classical composers. Such loosely supported comparisons of jazz and classical compositions were key elements in these efforts. While such cultural rhetoric proclaiming the art of both jazz and Ellington’s music was clearly advantageous for his career, and while his early Cotton Club years were central to his training, growth, and fame as a composer, Ellington himself found earlier models for appreciating the art of black popular music – and ultimately jazz – in the work and professional ideologies of his Harlem entertainment mentors and peers. In this tradition, popular music could indeed aspire to be artful entertainment.

Nat Hentoff once told me that Duke Ellington often described his music as “in the process of becoming.” One of the things we all love about jazz is its one time only nature – catching lightning in a bottle. Of course, this is in direct opposition to the formal compositional process where specific notes are rendered onto paper for eternity. Jazz composition thus involves a dramatic tension: the integration of improvisation into a planned format. Even after Ellington had solved this problem in a given composition, he continued to look for new ways to achieve that perfection of musical form which, at the same time, would make for fresh performances.

For most artists the commercial recording of a composition, arrangement, or performance is the definitive realization, but for Ellington – and here is the beauty and the frustration – the recording is but one of many performances of an ever-evolving piece of music.

The beauty is in Ellington’s conception of art: “Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don’t want it.”¹ One potential danger in the performing arts is the possibility of change. We wait for a certain something to happen, but maybe it won’t. Maybe something else will be there and change the experience, making it somewhat or even totally different. Maybe we will like it better, or maybe we will like it less. It’s a risk we as listeners take. Ellington not only demands this of us listeners, but also encouraged his players to take risks and inspire him.

A frustration many people have with Ellington is that in a 50-year career he wrote and recorded more music than we can ever digest. If only there were some way to limit it. Some recordings appear identical, but on a closer look, we notice details that are changed. Russell Procope said that he played the clarinet solo on Mood Indigo every night from 1946 to 1974 and never played it the same way twice.² This solo had the same basic pitches and rhythms as the famous Barney Bigard solo on the initial 1930 recording, but as with many of the Ellington set pieces, Procope was always aware that he had the latitude to change it as he saw fit, whether in small or big ways.

Ellington, unlike most of his fellow bandleaders, was loathe to tell the players too much on how to interpret his music. He wanted the individual band members to express themselves through his music. The spirit was more important than the notes. When he gave directions to the band, most often he would be descriptive (e.g., “give me some personality” and “reeds – you are the train whistle”), leaving the musical details to the players. Often he would tell a story to get what he was looking for.

Clark Terry tells the wonderful anecdote about recording “Hey, Buddy Bolden” from A Drum Is a Woman with Ellington in 1957. There was no written trumpet part for Clark, who told the Maestro that all he knew about Buddy Bolden was that he was the first great jazz musician in New Orleans long ago and that he played the trumpet. But that wasn’t enough information to create a trumpet feature. Ellington told Clark that Buddy Bolden had a sound so big, he could play the trumpet on one side of the Mississippi, and people could hear him all the way on the other shore; that he was the most stylish of dressers and always had all kinds of women following him around; that he would run diminished chords up and down the entire range of his horn like glorious fanfares that would inspire even Gabriel in heaven. Clark said that within a minute or two of hearing Ellington’s descriptive prose, “I thought I was Buddy Bolden.”³

Lawrence Brown, whose early personal dispute with Ellington soured their relationship, but nevertheless didn’t stop him from performing with the orchestra for another 25 years, would always say that Ellington’s real gift was sales. He was a con man of the highest order – he conned audiences into listening to his music and he conned the players into following him anywhere. Perhaps “conned” is a bit strong. Ellington had the ability to get people to want to do what he wanted.

Ellington would jest that he used a gimmick to keep his personnel – he paid them money. But the truth is that he paid them far less than they could earn elsewhere. As Rex Stewart wrote, “Those of us who have had the privilege of working with Duke are constantly reminded of the debt that we owe him for being allowed to be in his orbit.”⁴ Once an interviewer asked Harry Carney why he stayed so long (47 years). Harry responded that every day he got to go to work and sit down next to some great musicians, and on his stand would be a new piece of music with his name on it written by Duke Ellington. Why would he ever want to leave?⁵

Process

But what about the actual music? What was the process of composition? In the European classical tradition we tend to think of two opposite processes exemplified by Mozart and Beethoven. In general, Mozart worked quickly with few if any revisions, while Beethoven’s music went through numerous rewrites and changes. Each man achieved greatness through his own method.

So which camp does Ellington fall into? Actually both. Some pieces like Concerto for Cootie and Harlem Air Shaft were performed and recorded nearly as originally conceived. The eight-note motif of Concerto for Cootie came from Cootie Williams. Ellington heard it and offered him a small sum of cash. Since Cootie had no particular interest in doing anything with his lick, this seemed like a fair enough deal to him. Jimmy Maxwell, Cootie’s subsequent roommate in Benny Goodman’s band, once told me that the open horn theme in D-flat major, heard later in the composition, was improvised by Cootie. Since no score or second trumpet part has survived, we can’t know for sure.

On Harlem Air Shaft Ellington changed the title, added a clarinet solo on the third and fifth choruses, and allowed for trumpet improvisation and rhythm section interpretation. Other than that, the famous 1940 recording is quite like the Ellington handwritten score.

Other pieces contain large sections of music that were created in the recording and never written down. For the first three minutes or so of Happy Go Lucky Local (side one of the original 78 record), the original score was scrapped completely and replaced by music created from Ellington’s oral description of a rural train ride through the South. The conductor’s bell, the couplings banging together, the engineer’s whistle, and the other train onomatopoeia are all prelude to the magnificent blues choruses on side two.

Most of Ellington’s music falls somewhere between the two poles of composition and improvisation. Each piece is a case of problem solving by a master problem solver. Ellington’s lack of formal musical training kept him free of the usual tricks and clichés that many other composers, arrangers, and bandleaders employed. Instead he created his own solutions. One example is when Ben Webster was added to the four-man saxophone section, thus making a five-man section. On many of the preexisting charts, Webster was told to play the lead alto saxophone part down an octave. This would strengthen the lead without disturbing any of the harmonies. No new part would need to be created, nor would any of the original parts need to be rewritten. An interesting situation occurred: on the closely voiced sections, Webster’s tenor now sounded a second or third below Carney’s baritone. It is uncommon in most bands to put the baritone anywhere but on the bottom of the saxes or brass. Ellington liked this reversal of roles so much that he continued to use it as an alternative color to the normal saxophone order.

The most famous cliché about Ellington is Billy Strayhorn’s statement that Ellington’s instrument is his orchestra. On a superficial level this can be said about every composer, and certainly about every composer who conducts his own band or orchestra. But in the case of Ellington, it goes much deeper. Ellington wrote not only for a given instrument, but, more specifically, for an individual player with his own particular sound, timbre, personality, and musical sensibilities.

When a player left the band his features were generally retired or rearranged for an entirely different instrument. When new players joined the band, in many cases they would barely solo at all for six months or even a year until Ellington understood their musical personalities and how to integrate them into the sound of the band. Clark Terry’s only solo for a long, long time was Perdido. He often said, “Duke taught us who we were.” Britt Woodman replaced his idol Lawrence Brown in the trombone section. After his first performance with the band (where he played Brown’s solos note for note as he had copied them off the original records), Ellington summoned Britt to his dressing room where he told the young trombonist, “I hired Britt Woodman, not Lawrence Brown.”⁶

In 1939 three major jazz artists joined the orchestra: Billy Strayhorn (arranger/composer), Ben Webster (tenor saxophone), and Jimmie Blanton (bass). Strayhorn was an enormous help to Ellington, taking on the responsibility of writing nearly all the music Ellington had no time or inclination to write. Blanton revolutionized the way the bass was played in jazz by liberating it from its root functions and making it into a real melodic virtuosic voice. Ben Webster was Ellington’s first tenor saxophone star, melding the styles of Coleman Hawkins and Johnny Hodges.

Two Ellington pieces written in 1939 prior to the arrival of Webster and Blanton did not get recorded until March 6, 1940. Ellington had the challenge of figuring out how to integrate these two powerful personalities into already formed pieces: Ko-Ko and Jack the Bear.

Ko-Ko

Many critics cite Ko-Ko as Ellington’s greatest composition. One can easily see why it would receive such accolades. Like Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring it is at once the most primitive and most sophisticated music in its genre. This basic three-chord minor blues has tom-tom rhythms, plunger growls, and shrieks that go back before slavery all the way to Africa. And yet there is harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and formal sophistication ten to twenty years ahead of its time.

Little was changed on the recording of this piece from its original conception, with the exception of the two newcomers in the band. Blanton pretty much keeps to the written bass part until the second-to-last chorus, at which point each section of the band plays a scale-wise version of the four-note motif starting at the bottom and ascending to the clarinet at the top. This two-measure cascade is answered by a two-bar bass break, which essentially happens three times. Curiously Blanton, who was known for his outrageous technique and rhythmic and melodic invention, chooses to walk quarter notes in each of the three breaks. His sound and rhythmic propulsion are so astonishing that he makes what should be the weakest instrument in the band (and indeed it usually was until then) into Atlas holding up the world on his shoulders. He continues to walk under the shout chorus (the next 12 measures), further energizing the band in a way that no one in 1940 had ever heard.

Ellington’s solution for Ben Webster was of a different nature – much more subtle, but no less creative. Since all the reed voicings were already in complete four-part harmony, Ellington could use his normal solution for adding a saxophone part – having Ben Webster double the lead clarinet part down an octave. But in the case of Ko-Ko that would not work so well, since it’s a much more harmonically adventurous piece and the doubling would sound too conventional. Ellington wanted something wilder, so he wrote Webster a new part. Fortunately this part (in Ellington’s hand) has survived.

After resting for the introduction, the reeds enter at letter A, answering the valve trombone in rich four-part harmony. Webster’s part adds an extra note to each voicing. His rhythms are identical to the other reeds, but he adds a fifth, and, most notably, dissonant note to each harmony. While skipping from ninths, elevenths, thirteenths, and alterations, he also has an interesting melody of his own. This would be akin to taking a completed crossword puzzle and inserting a letter on each line that would give a deeper meaning to the words. Not just any letters, but odd ones like x, y, z, k, j … (Example 2.1).

Example 2.1. Tenor saxophone part (on bass clef) for Ben Webster on Ko-Ko (Duke Ellington), recorded March 6, 1940, and included on The Blanton-Webster Band, RCA Bluebird 5659–2-RB (CD, 1986).

Transcribed by David Berger. Publishing rights administered by Sony ATV Harmony (ASCAP).

The climax of this first chorus comes in the ninth and tenth bars, where Webster plays a normal blues melody from the dominant (B♭) to the ♭7 (D♭) of the key (E-flat minor). The genius of this is that at this moment the saxes and rhythm section are playing substitute chords of the ♭VI7 to the V7 (B7 to B♭7), thus making Webster’s notes the major seventh on a dominant ♭VI chord and the augmented ninth of the V7 (Example 2.2).

Example 2.2. Tenor saxophone part (on bass clef) for Ben Webster on Ko-Ko (Duke Ellington), recorded March 6, 1940, and included on The Blanton-Webster Band, RCA Bluebird 5659–2-RB (CD, 1986).

Transcribed by David Berger. Publishing rights administered by Sony ATV Harmony (ASCAP).

All this sounds natural due to the blues sensibilities that Ellington has created, but surely no one had ever written anything so daring in all of jazz. Where can we go from here?

The saxes, including Webster, are unison for the next three choruses. The succeeding chorus has the following call and response pattern: the trumpets play an ascending scale-wise four-note motif in unison and are answered by the harmonized reeds and then the harmonized trombones, each playing a repeated two-note motif. For this chorus Webster’s added pitches are the fifth saxophone and the first trombone, making each section sound richer. For a little icing on the cake, Ellington gives Webster a sixteenth-note turn on his notes with the trombones (Example 2.3).

Example 2.3. Arrangement of winds on Ko-Ko (Duke Ellington), recorded March 6, 1940, and included on The Blanton-Webster Band, RCA Bluebird 5659–2-RB (CD, 1986).

Transcribed by David Berger. Publishing rights administered by Sony ATV Harmony (ASCAP).

In the following chorus of cascading four-note scale motifs, Webster is the fourth saxophone, the first trombone, the fourth trumpet, and finally the mirror of the clarinet, thus making each section a little fuller and richer than they were in the original conception of the piece (Example 2.4).

Example 2.4. Arrangement of winds on Ko-Ko (Duke Ellington), recorded March 6, 1940, and included on The Blanton-Webster Band, RCA Bluebird 5659–2-RB (CD, 1986).

Transcribed by David Berger. Publishing rights administered by Sony ATV Harmony (ASCAP).

On the succeeding shout chorus Webster joins Otto Hardwick and Carney in the saxophone unison while Hodges and Bigard are with the dissonant brass voicings. At the end of the coda Webster first is the bottom trumpet, then echoes the baritone motif on the dominant, and finally finishes as the fourth reed on the scale-wise four-note motif much as he did in the sixth chorus.

The beauty of Webster’s part is its absolute integrity. It is as beautiful horizontally (melodically) as it is vertically (harmonically). Once one becomes aware of this tenor saxophone part, it is difficult not to listen for it throughout the arrangement. What should be a minor detail is written in such an interesting way that the informed listener doesn’t want to miss relishing any of it.

Jack the Bear

Jack the Bear presented Ellington with a different set of problems. Whereas Ko-Ko was a fully functioning piece that the band just needed more time to learn to perform, Jack the Bear lacked compositional focus. Here is a case of a piece that might have never been recorded had Ellington not figured out how to fix the arrangement. In this case both Jimmie Blanton and Billy Strayhorn provided the answer.

Ben Webster merely was given the lead clarinet part to play. The tenor saxophone sounds an octave lower than the clarinet, so with the exception of the clarinet solos (where Webster joins the other saxes in unison background figures), the added fifth saxophone merely serves to support the lead part, without adding any extra harmonic information.

In its original conception, Jack the Bear began with an ensemble introduction and used the same material for the coda. Here is where the piece faltered. This material, although not bad in itself, did not introduce or tie up the entire piece in a way that was satisfying. The intro’s relationship of loud/soft and high/low was too blatant. These opposites are explored throughout the piece, but in a much more subtle and integrated way.

Introductions and codas have the heavy responsibility of informing the listener what is about to unfold and then, at the end, summing up what we have heard. These were Ellington’s most difficult sections to write. Most often he would work out a piano introduction on the bandstand or in the recording studio. The spontaneity relieved him of thinking about how important this was, and left him to let his subconscious do the work.

Codas were another story. So often they would be added during the recording session (as in Purple Gazelle from the LP Afro-Bossa) or improvised by band members on the bandstand (Rockin’ in Rhythm and The Gal from Joe’s). Ruth Ellington once told me that her brother, Edward, had a great fear of death, and that writing endings symbolized death to him, hence his trouble writing them. There are some famous Strayhorn codas to complete Ellington arrangements (for example, I Got It Bad and Harlem). But just to be enigmatic, Ellington contributed the coda to Strayhorn’s Take the “A” Train.

In the case of Jack the Bear, Ellington’s son, Mercer, told me that Strayhorn came to New York to work with the orchestra in 1939 just as they were leaving on a European tour. The Maestro instructed Mercer to take care of Strayhorn until they got back. Strayhorn ended up staying in Ellington’s apartment, where he could look through Duke’s scores. One such score was an abandoned piece named Take It Away. Strayhorn came up with the idea for the trombone/reed/bass call-and-response introduction, which begins and ends the piece, thus focusing on a virtuoso bass solo like no one ever heard before. Aside from Blanton’s mastery of the instrument and huge sound, Ellington’s understanding of recording technique led him to have his bassist stand in front of the band – right next to the microphone. Although Ellington had been using this recording setup for years, this was his first recording of a bass feature with the big band, and the results were startling. The bass is a full partner to the rest of the band in terms of volume, intensity, and virtuosity. Furthermore in a mere three minutes Blanton set down the parameters of bass melody and harmony for the next 20 years.

Along with the introduction and coda came a new title: Jack the Bear. It’s no wonder that Ellington discarded Take It Away. Had this piece had something to do with the paring down of the instrumentation (like Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony), then this would have been a fine title. But sometimes Ellington chose working titles hastily just for identification, and after seeing where the piece went, he would come up with something more appropriate. The meaning of Jack the Bear is somewhat elusive. There was an expression around that time, “Jack the Bear, he don’t care,” but that in itself doesn’t pack enough meaning to explain this piece, so scholars dug back further to the early part of the twentieth century and found a New York pianist named Jack the Bear.⁷ Not a surprising name for that profession, what with Willie “The Lion” Smith and Donald “The Lamb” Lambert as competitors.

Since Jack the Bear never recorded, we don’t know a whole lot about how or what he played, but, most likely, the unison signal that Ellington uses as a transition throughout the piece (Example 2.5) was either a lick of his that Ellington had learned or it was something that reminded Ellington of his predecessor. It may even have come to Ellington from his mentor, Willie “The Lion” Smith. No matter where Ellington got it from, its harmonic roots in the traditional vaudeville chaser cannot be overlooked. It is this lick that inspires Blanton’s bass lines for the piece, so when we first hear the signal, we experience a feeling of recognition, having heard Blanton’s solo on the new introduction. This is absolutely crucial to the understanding and enjoyment of the piece.

Example 2.5. Unison signal in Jack the Bear (Duke Ellington), recorded March 6, 1940, and included on The Blanton-Webster Band, RCA Bluebird 5659–2-RB (CD, 1986).

Transcribed by David Berger. Publishing rights administered by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. (ASCAP) and Sony ATV Harmony (ASCAP).

This piece is essentially a 12-bar blues with some 8-bar strains interjected. The 8-bar introduction, which uses the reed responses from the first shout chorus by downwardly terracing the dynamics while lowering the octaves on successive statements, was definitely an afterthought. The original chart began on what is now the ninth bar. However Ellington’s piano part in this call and response with the band is new. What he originally conceived was a high loud whole-note chord that resolved to a soft unison quarter note on the downbeat of the second bar. Then the band tutti answer would stay soft for two more bars. This pattern is basically repeated twice, making slight alterations to fit the blues chord progression (Example 2.6).

Example 2.6. Piano chord and band tutti answer in original chart of Jack the Bear (Duke Ellington) in the Duke Ellington Collection, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Publishing rights administered by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. (ASCAP) and Sony ATV Harmony (ASCAP).

Now here’s the tricky part: Ellington removes the loud chord and its resolution from the original chart and replaces it with a blues motif that arpeggiates the vi minor seventh with half-step chromatic lower neighbor grace notes to the C (Example 2.7).

Example 2.7. Piano and band tutti answer in recording of Jack the Bear (Duke Ellington), recorded March 6, 1940, and included on The Blanton-Webster Band, RCA Bluebird 5659–2-RB (CD, 1986).

Transcribed by David Berger. Publishing rights administered by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. (ASCAP) and Sony ATV Harmony (ASCAP).

The odd thing is that on the fifth bar Ellington repeats this figure almost verbatim instead of using a C♭ to imply the ♭7 on the IV chord of the blues. It could be a IVmajor9, except that Blanton clearly stays on the tonic for the entire eight bars, never even hinting at the D♭ chord. Bars 9–12 do the traditional V to I cadence. They are then followed by the aforementioned unison signal for four extra bars.

The rest of the chart follows as planned until the recapitulation. When the blues chorus without the IV chord returns, it is Blanton who provides the calls to the band instead of Ellington. He also stays on the tonic for eight bars. Following this 12-bar chorus Blanton plays a spectacular chromatic four-bar break ending with an ascending scale up to the tonic. The band plays a tonic thirteenth chord to end the piece.

These are the most famous four measures in all jazz bass playing. Charles Mingus transcribed Blanton’s solos from this piece and kept that sheet of music his whole life. Modern bass playing starts here. But it is not just Blanton’s playing that makes this such a wonderful moment. This cadenza is the logical extension and conclusion of the little four-bar signal that inspired this whole three minutes of music.

If we look at the original score, in place of the final bass solo in the coda there are two bars of ensemble. Then there is some blank space on the paper followed by three alternative A♭7 voicings – none of which wound up being used on the recording. The blank space on the paper shows that Ellington was unsure how he would end this piece. Along comes Jimmie Blanton, and the puzzle is solved.

Duke Ellington had synesthesia, a neurological condition characterized by a merging of the brain’s sensory circuitry. He heard sounds as colors and saw colors as sounds. The flight pattern of a bird would occur to him as a musical phrase. The approach of a rumbling train could form a bass line in his head. To him, baritone saxophonist Harry Carney’s “D” was dark blue burlap. Johnny Hodges playing a “G” on his alto sax came across as light blue satin. As a synesthete, Duke experienced the world in a way that was very uniquely his own, a quality reflected in the way he functioned as both a bandleader and a composer. He saw people, situations, and art from a different angle and through a different lens. The lifelong, overriding theme he always harkened back to was one of connectedness and of finding harmonies and beauty where they might not be immediately obvious.

Duke Ellington, my uncle, was my father figure. After the departure of my father, we shared a uniquely intimate relationship. The two of us traveled together all over the globe, sleeping in the same hotel rooms, sharing transport and meals. I also worked as a manager for the band on major tours, and was the impetus behind some of Duke’s historical collaborations. It is from that vantage point that I discuss Duke’s career, with particular focus on his relationship with his band, his partnership with co-composer Billy Strayhorn, and his artistic vision and endeavors in his latter years. Based on my experience with my uncle, a portrait emerges of a bandleader who deftly managed the antics and unbridled egos of his musicians for the greater good of music; of a composer who eschewed conventions; and of a deep thinker who through his music tried to spread a message of unity and commonality to a world divided by politics, religion, and race.

The musical value of Ellington’s work, as opposed to its entertainment value, was recognized by a minority of observers quite early in his career. In the second half of the 1920s and the early 1930s, when his activities were focused mainly on New York, he was generally discussed in the context of his nightclub and theater associations. But those who responded to his radio broadcasts, heard widely across the United States, and his records, many of them released internationally, soon began modifying the reception of his music. It thus fell to relative outsiders to focus on the uniqueness of the actual sound produced by the Ellington band.

Significant contributors to this process were the Boston-based “classical music” reviewer Robert Donaldson (R. D.) Darrell, from as early as 1927, and Anglo-Irish bassist-arranger-composer-critic Spike Hughes, writing from 1931 onwards under the pseudonym “Mike.”¹ In 1932 the Australian Percy Grainger, as Dean of Music at New York University, became the first composer of what was called “serious” music to introduce his students to the Ellington band in person, and to the idea that its music was also worth considering seriously.²

However, researcher Bertil Lyttkens has noted that Ellington’s music arrived in Europe in 1925, long before any recordings of his band.³ At least five songs by Ellington and lyricist Jo Trent – four of them specially created for the all-black revue Chocolate Kiddies – were heard in several European cities such as Berlin and Moscow, performed by the Sam Wooding band and the show’s singers, including Adelaide Hall.⁴ Despite a confident press prediction of recordings by the cast members, it’s unlikely that any such recordings were made, let alone released.⁵ Yet during the 1920s, cover versions made in Europe of these Ellington songs actually outnumbered those made in America.⁶

Not until Duke’s first major tour in 1931 did he step out beyond the USA, with his first one-week appearance at Toronto’s Imperial Theatre. In some ways Canada was not so different from the States, and Ellington played opposite a movie that, despite an unenthusiastic review in the Toronto Telegram, got six times as much column space as the band. But the journalist did make an artistic point: “When they play Liza in one dance number accompaniment they demonstrate that they can serve up sweet music of a high order, but they waste too much of the rest of their time trying to get hot on the high notes. We would rather hear some music.”⁷ Already, his manager Irving Mills was ensuring that Ellington was widely interviewed on this tour, and the first article under Duke’s byline appeared the same year in another English-speaking country, namely England.⁸

The major change in the evaluation of Ellington’s music came about when his band first went to Europe in 1933. Otto Hardwick, a saxophonist and clarinetist who left Ellington’s band in 1928 to spend a year in Europe, took retrospective credit for this development: “In 1929 you couldn’t get him to cross the Hudson river! … I told Duke when I got back [from Europe], it was a terrific field for him. It took a couple of years to soak in, but it did eventually, once Mills got wind of it.”⁹ Thanks to Mills and U.K. bandleader-impresario Jack Hylton, Duke was booked for an eight-week tour of Europe. Also thanks to Mills, no doubt, the tour was noted in a Time magazine article of more than 700 words:

The piece is mostly accurate and highly enthusiastic, but tame compared to the fever that gripped local writers and audiences in the run-up to this historic visit. Articles in both the specialist and general press culminated with the weekly Melody Maker (mainly aimed at British musicians) beginning its front-page coverage with: “Well! He’s here! We have been reading about the Duke this last four or five years; he has become an almost legendary figure; it seemed impossible that we should ever see him in the flesh, or hear those amazing sounds other than via a gramophone. Yet, unbelievably, he is here.”¹¹

That gives a flavor of the anticipation that fueled audience reaction on the opening night of the band’s two-week vaudeville booking at the London Palladium. In 1955 a newspaper gave Ellington’s elaborated account:

Duke was impressed too by a reception at Jack Hylton’s Mayfair home and, at a subsequent private party, by the presence and active interest of members of Britain’s royal family. On another occasion he was welcomed by classical composer Constant Lambert. Ellington also socialized with less renowned musicians, such as the BBC Symphony’s harpist Sidonie Goossens and her husband, composer-conductor Hyam Greenbaum, who was part of Spike Hughes’s circle.¹³ Band members also encountered the British version of racism, with difficulties over hotel bookings, while Ellington himself stayed at the prestigious Dorchester Hotel, which had previously hosted Paul Robeson.¹⁴

Some fans and journalists harbored doubts as to whether Duke’s Palladium slot was tainted by his instincts as an entertainer, which were underlined by the presence of vocalist Ivie Anderson, the tap-dance duo Bailey and Derby, and “snake-hips” specialist Bessie Dudley, who danced to Rockin’ in Rhythm. Spike Hughes arranged for Melody Maker to promote Sunday performances, first at the Palladium and then at the Trocadero cinema, billed as “musicians’ concerts” and intended to feature Ellington’s “pure” jazz repertoire.¹⁵ Hughes’s program notes even instructed the audience not to applaud individual solos, but when Duke noticed audience laughter at the wah-wah style of the brass, he inserted some of his popular repertoire after all. Most interestingly, in a recorded interview with Percy Mathieson Brooks, editor of Melody Maker, Ellington was asked whether “rhythmic music” would ever migrate from the ballroom to the concert hall. His answer may have been pre-scripted in a style uncharacteristic of his speech patterns, but he said: “Yes, inevitably, perhaps not in this generation; it is the youngsters of these days who will make the audiences of tomorrow, and they have no prejudices of which they must rid themselves.”¹⁶

The enthusiastic response of local players immediately increased the number of cover versions, most remarkably seven tracks by Madame Tussaud’s Dance Orchestra; despite being the in-house band of a wax museum, it achieved some very lifelike impressions. European fans too gained a huge boost from this Ellington visit. As for Ellington himself, he did not expect such wild acclaim, or to find so much knowledge of his work displayed by the more aware listeners and commentators. As he wrote in 1940, “The main thing I got in Europe was spirit, it lifted me out of the groove. That kind of thing gives you courage to go on with a lot of things you want to do yourself.”¹⁷

The careful choice of words seems in retrospect designed to counter accusations, which began flying in 1934 and 1935, that Ellington’s head was fatally turned by comparisons made in Europe between his work and that of Ravel, Stravinsky, Delius, and even Bach. The first three were named no doubt because of Duke’s developing harmonic language, although when the name of Delius was first mentioned to him (in fact, by Percy Grainger) Ellington had never heard of this rather unique Anglo-German composer. More meaningful, and more fraught, was the comparison between Ellington and George Gershwin, which has since been made more explicitly by several writers.

A recent writer summarizes the possible influence on Duke of the Gershwin comparison: “Evidently this figuring of Ellington as a more righteous and authentic Gershwin had an effect on Ellington, who in 1935 controversially attacked Porgy and Bess for its inauthenticity, and produced a string of his own serious, extended compositions such as Reminiscing in Tempo (1935), Symphony in Black (1935), and Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue (1937), whose titles deliberately glossed that of Rhapsody in Blue.”¹⁸

The content of these Ellington compositions is discussed elsewhere in this volume, but the increase in ambition, compared to the 1931 Creole Rhapsody (another pseudo-Gershwin title), suggests the “things you want to do yourself.” Reminiscing in Tempo aroused particular hostility from Spike Hughes, despite his earlier comment that Creole Rhapsody was “the first classic of modern dance music,”¹⁹ and from the producer and critic John Hammond, who in 1933 had talked of funding an Ellington musical show. Hammond and Hughes were both advocates of jazz drawing strength from its African-American roots, as opposed to writers who saw jazz as raw material for Europeanized composition. The latter group included some of Ellington’s African-American contemporaries, such as the writer-educator Alain Locke and composer-arranger William Grant Still.

The band’s tremendous reception in Europe, then, should be understood as providing vindication of Ellington’s direction, and of his compositional leanings, rather than any specific musical inspiration. The song Best Wishes, which he claimed to have written “since I have been in England,” was recorded a year earlier in New York.²⁰ Similarly, a piece with the Swedish title Smorgasbord and Schnapps, co-credited to Duke, Rex Stewart, and Stewart’s friend, arranger-guitarist Brick Fleagle, was recorded shortly before the band’s 1939 visit there. A seemingly more plausible dedication, Serenade to Sweden, was premiered during this visit, but nevertheless had its genesis in the 1934 Ellington recording of Moonglow.²¹

This second trip to Europe in 1939 again made a huge impression on audiences. Stewart, one of the few additions to Ellington’s notably stable personnel since the 1933 tour, gave a graphic description of what European appreciation meant to the visitors, despite the occasional racial stereotyping in some of the newspaper coverage: “You have to be a Negro to understand. Europe is a different world. You can go anywhere, do anything, talk to anybody … You are like a guy who has eaten hot dogs all your life and is suddenly offered caviar. You can’t believe it.”²²

Unlike the 1933 tour, in which most appearances were on vaudeville bills, the majority of the 1939 dates were concerts, with the band as the sole attraction. This applied not only to engagements in Paris, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway, but also to two weeks in Sweden, where the band played small towns such as Huskvarna as well as three dates in Stockholm. The third date coincided with Ellington’s fortieth birthday, which found him woken in his hotel room by the Swedish Radio band, and later serenaded on stage by ten young girls singing “Happy Birthday” in English, with the impromptu addition of teenage singing star Alice Babs, who happened to be in the audience.

As when Duke was interviewed live on the BBC evening newscast in 1933, this birthday concert was broadcast live – both unheard-of departures for European national radio networks at the time. He also spoke at length to a Swedish interviewer, incidentally making a diplomatic endorsement of local polka and schottische music. (“Well, it is different from our swing, of course, but it’s very beautiful and very graceful.”) Not too much should be read into his inclusion at several concerts of a contemporary Swedish pop song, En Rød Liten Stuga. As Rolf Dahlgren pointed out in 1994, “The company that handled the concerts was mostly a music publisher [Reuter & Reuter], so they wanted him to play one of their tunes … Duke wrote [arranged] it in a few minutes and his manager, Irving Mills, wrote the English lyrics.”²³

The 1939 tour included no appearances in England, because of conflict between the U.S. and U.K. musicians’ unions. This was brewing as far back as 1933, when Jack Hylton was not allowed to play in the States, and then English bandleader Ray Noble had to form a U.S. band with only two sidemen from his English outfit, to which the British union replied with a total ban on visiting instrumentalists. Unlike in other European countries, this impasse continued in Britain until the mid-1950s, with the exception of players perceived as vaudeville performers, such as Fats Waller and Art Tatum (both in 1938) and pianist-singer Hoagy Carmichael in 1948.

Thus it was that, also in 1948, Ellington’s first postwar trip abroad involved putting the whole band on notice, apart from vocalist Kay Davis and vocalist-violinist-trumpeter Ray Nance, who could boost Duke’s credentials as a vaudeville attraction. A return visit to the London Palladium was followed by a tour of theaters in the U.K. and a brief trip to the Continent, all accompanied by a British trio. But the only audio documentation of this venture was a London recording of Nance backed by the quartet of British-Caribbean musicians led by drummer Ray Ellington; naturally, the records were billed as “Ray Nance and the Ellingtonians.”²⁴

By contrast, Ellington’s three-month-long 1950 tour of the Continent was with the full band, augmented by saxophonist Don Byas (who was already resident in Europe) and second drummer Butch Ballard, hired to cover for an increasingly unreliable Sonny Greer. Interestingly, critical reaction to the opening Paris concerts was so divided – between those who thought Ellington should provide all new material and those who craved the earlier classics, with added dissension between devotees of the 1927 repertoire and the 1940 repertoire – that he asked Jazz Hot magazine to print the following statement:

Ellington’s 1950 European concert program included a recent extended work, the excellent The Tattooed Bride, which, incidentally, a contemporary commentator claimed was written or at least begun in Paris in 1948.²⁶ The 1950 tour also produced a number of small-group recordings led by Ellington’s alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges and others but without any participation by Duke, doubtless precluded by his Columbia recording contract. But apart from the expected adulation, little specific inspiration came from the trip, and it was an already existing commission from the NBC Symphony that enabled Duke to work on the extended composition Harlem during his return passage to New York.

In the postwar period, however, the inspirations and commissions started to come from further afield. A keen student of black history, Duke was honored by a request in 1947 from the Liberian government for a piece commemorating the establishment of the republic one hundred years earlier; the half-hour Liberian Suite was first performed at Ellington’s Carnegie Hall concert that year. In the summer of 1956, shortly after his popular triumph at the Newport Jazz Festival, he appeared at the annual Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, which led to the commission for Such Sweet Thunder, an album-length suite on Shakespearean characters and themes. Although this premiered in New York the following May, he duly played it at the 1957 Shakespeare Festival, which led to another return engagement in July 1958 before Britain’s Princess Margaret, for whom Ellington had composed the ten-minute Princess Blue.

In October 1958, the Leeds (England) Music Festival invited Ellington to contribute to its first-ever jazz concerts. (The organizers of the festival, one of whom was related to the royal family, were probably unaware of the existence of Princess Blue.) This provided the excuse for a full English and European tour, and afforded me among many others a first opportunity to see Duke in action. Too inexperienced to appreciate the finer points, I have an abiding memory of Hodges being featured on “Half the Fun” (from Such Sweet Thunder), and its closing rhythm-section vamp coinciding with the stage-lights fading to black as a spotlight picked out Strayhorn, who came on stage just to play a single low piano note.

What Ellington specifically recalled was his official presentation to Queen Elizabeth II, along with her husband and her sister Princess Margaret. The result was his creation of The Queen’s Suite, recorded in spring 1959 as a gift to Her Majesty and never released or even performed publicly until 1976, except for Duke’s piano solo “The Single Petal of a Rose.” Although an autumn 1959 European tour excluding the U.K. provided no such direct inspiration, the winter of 1960–1961 did find Ellington and Strayhorn spending several weeks in Paris working on the film Paris Blues. During this stay Duke was also commissioned to record incidental music for the revival of a 250-year-old comedy by Alain-René LeSage, Turcaret.

With the new decade Ellington abandoned his beloved transatlantic liners for the inevitability of air travel, and from 1963 to 1973 undertook concert tours of Europe every year but two, despite the increasingly changed tastes in the music business. Other aspects of the European experience were less quick to change, as witnessed by journalist Steve Voce at a 1963 Liverpool concert. Before going on stage, Ellington switched on a dressing-room TV set, to be confronted by the hugely popular Black and White Minstrel Show. While Voce squirmed with embarrassment, “Suddenly the Minstrels went into Caravan, and [trombonist] George Chisholm came on. ‘Well produced show,’ said Duke.”²⁷ On the plus side, the amount of coverage in both the general and specialist press was considerable, despite Liverpool’s Beatles beginning their bid for world domination.

From now on, Europe became just part of the band’s itinerary. In the autumn of 1963, seven years after first using jazz musicians for cultural missions, the U.S. State Department finally called on Ellington. The tour, intended to last several months, included the Indian subcontinent and various Middle Eastern countries before being terminated in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination. (Ellington biographer John Edward Hasse notes that other ongoing State Department tours were not cancelled.²⁸) The important point is that this trip had an artistic outcome, as Ellington knew it would. “From my perspective, I think I have to be careful not to be influenced too strongly by the music we heard … I don’t think that is the smart thing to do. I would rather give a reflection of the adventure itself,” he told Stanley Dance. “Later on, something musical will come out of it, in its own form.”²⁹

Europe, of course, still provided an audience of knowledgeable and appreciative listeners, for whom Harlem was revived on the 1963 tour. The four initial movements of Impressions of the Far East, inspired by the State Department tour, received probably their first public performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall in February 1964, along with a preexisting Strayhorn composition renamed “Isfahan.” These compositions were played nightly throughout Europe before their U.S.A. unveiling two months later. This was soon followed by the band’s first tour of Japan and the Far East proper, which inspired Ad Lib on Nippon, another composition debuted in Europe, during the 1965 trip. Noting that “the choice of material for this year’s tour was even better than last year,” my concert review devoted 400 of nearly 1200 words to the 20-minute version of Black, Brown and Beige, which Ellington would record for his personal “stockpile” on his return to the U.S.³⁰

From 1958 onwards, Europe’s national television stations began taping concerts and documentaries of Ellington’s music. After Duke introduced his first Concert of Sacred Music in San Francisco in 1965 and repeated it in various locations including Coventry Cathedral early the following year, the Coventry performance was broadcast on TV throughout the U.K. at Easter 1966, 15 months before the San Francisco version was aired on U.S. public television. Even the genesis of Ellington’s Sacred Concerts may have a European connection, as biographer Derek Jewell reports Ellington’s debut appearance in church taking place in Paris on Christmas Eve, 1960, before an estimated 100,000 listeners, with his solo piano rendition of Come Sunday.³¹

The January–February 1966 European tour was also significant for introducing a new composition called La Plus Belle Africaine, prepared in advance of the band’s April trip to the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. Among other American participants was pianist-composer Randy Weston, not only a musical descendant of Duke but for a while published by Tempo Music, the Ellington family imprint. (It was in Switzerland, though, that Duke first met, and produced a recording by, South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, another Ellington disciple.) As well as endorsing his position as a symbolic leader of the African diaspora, this festival had symbolic meaning for Duke himself; his stage announcements refer to this first performance on African soil coming “after writing African music for 35 years.”³² While there, he also insisted on playing for America’s ambassador to Senegal, Mercer Cook, son of bandleader-songwriter Will Marion Cook, who mentored Duke back in 1920s New York.

In 1967 Europe saw the band again, but with fewer noteworthy new compositions apart from The Shepherd, which was later incorporated in the Second Sacred Concert of 1968. Another revival of an extended work (say, Reminiscing in Tempo) might have compensated for this lack of new material, although the previously revived Harlem did appear at some 1967 concerts. But one notable aspect of the Second Sacred Concert was the use of Swedish singer Alice Babs, whom Ellington had officially met (apart from her presence at his fortieth birthday concert in 1939) on his 1963 tour. He not only recorded an album with her then, but resolved to employ her special talent again, making her the only European musician featured with the band (apart from last-minute stand-ins such as saxist Tubby Hayes and occasional guests such as pianist Raymond Fol).

In lieu of any European visit in 1968, Ellington undertook his debut tour of Mexico and South America, his first experience of the southern hemisphere. South America was such virgin territory that the Buenos Aires audience reception was comparable to that in London 35 years earlier, according to Stanley Dance and Harry Carney, who were each present on both occasions.³³ A pre-tour piece captured on film and disc as Mexicanticipation led to the post-tour studio recording of a Latin American Suite that developed the same material, plus further movements. Its content parallels Ellington’s Far East Suite, the 1966 recording that developed from Impressions of the Far East, in reflecting the increased tendency of recent jazz toward a less harmonically oriented, more “modal” approach. The Latin American Suite complements that by picking up the 1960s interest in fusing jazz improvisation with Latin rhythms, a development foreshadowed by Ellington and Juan Tizol’s Caravan as far back as 1936.

By autumn 1969, after a gap of two-and-a-half years, European demand was still high and in many cities the band performed two long concerts in a single evening. Thus a fan could observe deities like Lawrence Brown and Cootie Williams not only walking the earth, but also grabbing a snack between shows at the funky diner across the road from London’s Hammersmith Odeon. For this writer, this image is irresistibly brought to mind by the so-called 70th Birthday Concert album, which, compiled from two British appearances, is short on major works but has the last authorized live recordings of Johnny Hodges.

Within a matter of months, Hodges was dead and Brown retired from music. As the pace of international touring increased, the remaining seniors in the band and even younger members must have experienced it all as a blur. Europe in the summer of 1970 was preceded by a visit to the Far East and Australasia, where at one of his endless press calls Ellington declared, “This is the life for me. I’m a wandering minstrel. I go around the world making noises and listening to noises.”³⁴ The suite that emerged from this last experience, The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, may be compared to The Far East Suite for its conversion of exotic experiences into Ellington noises, just as the 1971 Togo Brava Suite (dedicated to Togo, the African state that first put his image on a postage stamp) bears an ideological similarity to La Plus Belle Africaine.

The peak of the overseas touring schedule was achieved in 1971, with five weeks in the U.S.S.R., followed by five weeks in Europe, followed by three weeks in Latin America. The Russian venture, organized by promoter George Wein rather than the State Department, was successful as propaganda as well as on musical grounds. Given the strings of one-nighters elsewhere Duke was almost surprised at the gaps between performances. He said when interviewed in London, “Do you know I only had to do two concerts a week there? Man, that was easy. So easy, I had to find something for the band to do. So I called rehearsals!”³⁵

The next year saw the longest tour yet of the Far East, while in 1973 the only international trip – and Ellington’s final overseas tour – was a mere six weeks concentrated on Europe with a brief side trip to Ethiopia and Zambia. Opening and closing in London, the tour included Ellington’s Third Sacred Concert in Westminster Abbey and participation in the Royal Command Performance at the London Palladium.³⁶ Although some rehearsals of the sacred music took place before leaving for England, the band’s only tryout with Alice Babs, who once again took a leading role, was on the day of the concert itself.

The band was now without Cootie Williams too and, sadly, Paul Gonsalves was hospitalized shortly after arriving in London. As one of the half-dozen outsiders who sneaked into the Abbey for the rehearsal, I was able to witness Babs and Carney running through the bewitching My Love, while Ellington himself looked almost as ill as he must have been, seven months to the day before his death. It cannot have helped his equanimity that, nine days later at the high-minded Berlin Jazz Festival, vocalist Tony Watkins was greeted with such booing that Duke terminated the concert, allegedly suffering a minor heart attack. Once again, a spotlight was thrown on the relative proportions of creativity and entertainment Ellington deployed in order to please all the sections of his audience.

Perhaps I may be allowed to draw attention to one new development during the last years of Ellington’s life. The repertory movement devoted to recreating his classic works was already under way, given a boost by London’s Alan Cohen band (of which I was a member) performing and recording in 1972 a complete version of Black, Brown and Beige. This preceded the live album of the New England Conservatory Repertory Ensemble under Gunther Schuller, including Reminiscing in Tempo, and the George Wein-sponsored New York Jazz Repertory Orchestra, which performed the works of Duke and others at the Newport Jazz Festival–New York from 1974 to 1976.

Clearly such activity, which continues to the present day, is somewhat secondary to the huge achievement of Ellington and his sidemen in creating the music in the first place. But the reception which that repertory music received in Europe, and eventually the world, was far from insignificant in inspiring musical developments and in underlining the respect with which the original music deserves to be treated.

At the beginning of the prologue of his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, Edward Kennedy Ellington described his parents and his childhood in the following insightful and fanciful narrative:

Ellington’s pride in discussing his family, early childhood, and adolescent development reveals much about his personality and sense of privilege and destiny. He obviously perceived himself as a proud member of a family that was upwardly mobile and actively involved in the pursuit of an economically stable and socially fulfilling life, aspirations that were shared by many middle-class African Americans in Washington, D.C., during the first 20 years of the century. The famous photograph of the four-year-old Ellington – in which he stands regally, dressed in what appears to be a military uniform, with his right arm resting on a chair, and his left arm placed behind his back – reveals volumes about his early childhood as a boy of self-confidence and promise.

Much of Music Is My Mistress describes Ellington’s idyllic childhood and gives us an insight into his complex personality. He discusses his family in the first chapter, including details of his father’s entrepreneurial skills and means of making a living.

Ellington also commented on his father’s penchant for speaking effectively and effortlessly in flattering poetic terms, particularly to women.

It is plausible that Ellington’s ability as a man of verbal eloquence had its origin in his father’s utterances. In support of that assertion, one need only cite Duke Ellington’s convincing assessment of his father’s persuasive and expressive verbal fluency:

What Ellington reveals here are the sensibilities of a proud man whose values were profoundly shaped by the optimism of the emerging, urban African-American middle class of the first two decades of the twentieth century. As the eminent historian John Hope Franklin states:

Duke Ellington was an extraordinary creative artist whose brilliant contributions to the world were rooted in his profound understanding of the broader African-American music tradition. His particular genius was the ability to create a new paradigm that celebrated and reinforced the characteristic elements of that tradition while simultaneously introducing significant innovations to it. As such, his work was shaped fundamentally by aesthetic principles and conceptual processes of music-making derived from African music and altered to conform to the realities of the African-American experience. Although he visited Africa on concert tours several times during his fabulous career, there is little evidence that he was directly influenced by specific African music. On the other hand, there is abundant empirical evidence that his musical universe was centered in the concepts that collectively comprise the African-American music tradition, and that his basic sources were African-American manifestations or transformations of modes of musical thought and practice shared with West African cultures and the African diaspora. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states in discussing the nature of the relationship between African and African-American culture, and refuting the notion that African-American culture has nothing to do with African culture:

Research into the relationship between African and African-American music certainly concurs with the basic viewpoint stated above. This viewpoint is also consistent with the published work of Robert Farris Thompson, who studies the relationship between African and African-American art, and Albert Raboteau, who studies African and African-American religion. Moreover, Duke Ellington, in an interview with Carter Harman in 1964, stated unequivocally: “My strongest influences, my inspirations, were all Negro.”⁷

To paraphrase a passage I wrote in 1974, the relationship between African and African-American musical traditions consists of the common sharing of a core of conceptual approaches to the process of music-making, and hence is not basically quantitative but qualitative. The particular forms of African-American music that evolved in the New World are specific manifestations of this shared conceptual framework, which reflects both the unique nature and specific contexts of the African-American experience. As such, the essence of their “Africanness” is not a static body of something that can be depleted, but rather, a shared conceptual predisposition, the manifestations of which are infinite. The common core of this shared cultural affinity consists of ways of doing something, not simply something that is done.⁸

The African influence on African-American music and, by extension, Duke Ellington, has been reflected historically in shared or similar conceptions regarding (1) the fundamental nature of the musical experience; (2) principles of musical organization – specific approaches to musical form, patterns of continuity, and syntax; and (3) performance practices – the processes involved in actively making music.

Many fundamental aspects of the musical experience are shared by African and African-American music. One of the most salient of these shared concepts is the view of music as a communal activity in which there are no detached listeners, but rather a communion of participants – a view which expects and encourages the active interaction of all participants. The notion of “inclusion” in the music-making process becomes an important dimension of performance in both African and African-American music.

Duke Ellington’s extensively documented method of working with his band members is an excellent example of this practice. Ellington developed an exceptionally fruitful collaborative relationship with his band. As Gunther Schuller states:

The Ellington band was shaped by the unique artistic symbiotic relationship between Ellington and individual artists like Bubber Miley, “Tricky Sam” Nanton, Sonny Greer, Otto Hardwick, Arthur Whetsol, Lawrence Brown, Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard, Paul Gonsalves, Cootie Williams, Ben Webster, and Clark Terry, to name a few. Each of these artists had a distinct musical personality, and Ellington created the precise musical framework to enhance and expand that personality by challenging the artist to explore new musical forms and contexts in which to achieve even greater heights of sublime artistry. In a broad sense, Ellington’s approach both reinforced a traditional African/African-American ideal and created an innovative means of doing so. He was a composer because his overall conception shaped the final result, but he also worked within the received framework of communal collaboration.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote “We Wear the Mask,” a poem that captured with exceptional insight an important aspect of the African-American experience:

The metaphor of the mask also invokes minstrelsy, the nineteenth-century entertainment tradition based on the crude caricature of African-American culture by white men in blackface – a tradition that provided ideological support for the institution of slavery. Simply put, minstrelsy was a white distortion of African-American culture for commercial gain. Minstrelsy was not only the first indigenous American popular music, but also established norms of show business practice, some of which are still part of American popular entertainment today. As an entertainer entering the field at the beginning of the 1920s, Ellington – like many before him, including composer Scott Joplin, comedian Bert Williams, and George Hicks, founder of the Georgia Minstrels, the first African-American minstrel troupe, in 1865 – all had to accommodate the expectations of this tradition. Ellington wore the mask in the 1920s as his mentor, the erudite violinist and composer Will Marion Cook, had worn it almost two decades earlier. That is, although Ellington was always regal, urbane, and sophisticated in his public appearance and demeanor – a credible exemplar of the scholar Alain Locke’s “New Negro” – his work at the Cotton Club in Harlem was influenced very much by remnants of the minstrel tradition. The cover page of Jig Walk, one of his earliest piano compositions, written in 1925 for the musical revue Chocolate Kiddies, clearly displays the stereotyped images of the minstrel show.

The Cotton Club patrons were almost exclusively white and the entire theatrical ambiance was based on the image of either the “old southern plantation” or the “primitive” jungle. The titles of many of the compositions designed for the Cotton Club revues invoke the image of the African jungle (Jungle Blues, Jungle Jamboree, Jungle Nights in Harlem, and so on). The suave, tuxedo-clad Ellington band played beside these minstrel show-like tableaus, and here we have Ellington cast in the role of the music creator of “fantasy land” revues based on stereotypical images of “darkies” on the southern plantation or the exotic, erotic mysteries of Africa.

There is no question that the smashing success of Josephine Baker’s appearance in La Revue nègre, which opened in Paris in October 1925 and catapulted her into instant stardom, had an influence on the subsequent New York Cotton Club revues. Major figures of European “highbrow” culture were fascinated by the Revue nègre. Glenn Watkins, in his astute study of the development of modernism, tells us:

The cultural context of this adulation must be taken into consideration. The early twentieth-century emergence of “modernism” in art, music, and dance was fueled by a strong attraction to “primitive,” “exotic,” and presumably “pure” non-European models, and Africa – as expressed by African and African-American music, dance, and art – was central among these. The concept of absolutely pure “primitive” expression was highly attractive to many of the intellectual elite of the post-World War I “Jazz Age,” who were seeking new models of human expression in the wake of what appeared to be the “end of the century decadence” of European culture.

Duke Ellington’s Cotton Club revues were an American manifestation of this phenomenon, and Carl Van Vechten, George Antheil, George Gershwin, and others were interested in these developments as well. The notion of Duke Ellington as a wearer of the mask relates to the supreme irony of this extraordinarily creative man producing music that was “pseudo-African” on the surface, but in reality was the manifestation of new approaches to the creation of African-American music. The Cotton Club revues enabled Ellington to experiment with new ideas, establish a band with a distinctive style built upon the musical personalities of his specific performers, and expand his compositional skill within a tradition in which improvisation was vital. Behind the mask of an entertainer was a superb creative artist who defined much of what is best in African-American and American culture.

In a broader sense, Ellington was a pivotal agent in effecting an extraordinary (and perhaps inevitable) change in the perception of African-American music by the American public in general and the intellectual elite in particular. During the 1920s and 1930s, most popular depictions of African Americans were still dominated by minstrelsy’s image of “black folk” as crude, ignorant, and childish. Ellington’s music, his “suave persona,” and his scintillating, disciplined, and musically superb orchestra fundamentally altered American society’s impressions of African Americans. This dynamic music encompassed urban sophistication, postwar optimism, an unquenchable zest for life, and the ability to capture the essence of multifaceted human emotions suggested by such titles as Black and Tan Fantasy, Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady, Solitude, and It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).

Ellington’s music reflected a more nuanced, subtle, and complex reading of African-American culture, and, ultimately, projected a sophisticated and realistic understanding of African-American life. Duke Ellington used his music to communicate the complexity, depth, joy, and beauty of the contemporary African-American and American experience.

The European perception of people of sub-Saharan Africa and the African diaspora as inferior human beings is centuries old, and was expressed in the most direct terms even by some of America’s most eminent champions of egalitarianism, democracy, and liberty. In 1785, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia was first published in France and included the following:

If Jefferson (1743–1826) had lived in Newport, Rhode Island, given his intellectual curiosity, he might have heard of the music written and published by the African-American former slave and singing-school master Newport Gardner (1746–1826). Eileen Southern’s comprehensive study of African-American music, The Music of Black Americans, quotes a contemporary writer, John Ferguson, from 1830:

And if Jefferson, late in life, had visited Philadelphia and paid close attention to the formal band music of that time, he would have heard of Francis Johnson (1792–1844), who was described in a popular book published in 1819 as the “leader of the band at all balls, public and private.”¹³ Eileen Southern writes of Johnson:

Francis Johnson was followed by a long line of musically literate African-American composers who were active in the nineteenth century as concert bandleaders, dance bandleaders, and publishers of sheet music that reflected the musical taste of their time. These musicians were active in major cities such as Philadelphia, where composers Aaron J. R. Connor (d. 1850), James Hemmenway (1800–1849), and William Appo (c.1808–c.1878) were among the leading composers and bandleaders; St. Louis, where Joseph Postlewaite (1827–1889) directed at least four bands and published dances and marches that became well known; and Boston and Cleveland, where Justin Holland (1819–1887) published music that was also well known in the United States and Europe. By the end of the nineteenth century, African-American composers in the written tradition of minstrel music, such as James Bland, were internationally acclaimed, and by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the “kings” of published classic ragtime were musical giants like Scott Joplin and Tom Turpin.

Duke Ellington’s emergence as a major figure in American music occurred during his tenure at the Cotton Club, which began in 1927. In this context, Ellington catapulted his band into the first rank, as a result of the musical excellence of its members, the brilliance and imagination of his original music for revues at this venue, and the new image he and the band projected to the American public, as superb artists of the highest order. Between the time he first published a piano solo piece and the time he left the Cotton Club, Ellington had become one of the most popular and influential musicians in the country. One reason for Ellington’s emergence was his major role in changing the general public’s view of his music, from signifying the sensibilities of a shuffling, indolent minstrel show character to demonstrating the power of a creative artist whose ideas were compelling as music and influential as agents of social change. Ellington was a cultural icon during his lifetime, and as an icon continued to shine even more brightly long after his death.

The distortion of African-American culture associated with the nineteenth-century minstrel show enticed the audience to laugh at the antics of crude, ignorant, and inferior black people as depicted by white blackface performers with large red lips. The thousands of African-American people who fled from the stifling “neo-peasant trap” of sharecropping and other institutions of “slavery by another name” in the post-Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) legal environment of the South were entranced by their exodus to the bustling, dynamic life of the northern cities, where at least some “people of color” appeared to be living exciting lives. The powerful, authentic music of the 1920s “Jazz Age” enticed black and white people to participate in the exuberant celebration of life that this music both reflected and demanded. This dramatic shift in the perception of African-American culture in the United States resulted from many important and diverse social, political, and economic factors, as with any such major transformation in the cultural values of any society. Nevertheless, an undeniable quantum shift of cultural values occurred in the United States in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and the fundamental nature of the American spirit was indelibly transformed by the emergence of jazz and blues as a phenomenal expression of the American experience. Edward Kennedy Ellington was a major force in making this change happen.

Duke Ellington’s first original extended work, Creole Rhapsody, recorded in 1931, reveals his early compositional concerns. The work is over eight minutes long and required both sides of a 78 rpm disc. The title makes reference to “Creoles of color” or people of African, French, and/or Spanish descent.¹⁵ In any case, Ellington seems to clearly connect this music to its ethnic identity. Musically, Creole Rhapsody represents the diversity of Ellington’s musical output. The piece begins with minor-mode “exotic” jungle music, which after 16 measures moves to a brief piano cadenza, before the next contrasting section in a major mode, organized into 12-measure phrases. What becomes obvious very soon is that this piece is not intended to support dancing. The steady tempo and regularity necessary for dancing are interrupted often throughout the piece, sometimes symbolically thwarted by Ellington’s piano cadenzas. The music at the end of the first part evokes the mellow calmness of Ellington’s mood pieces. It becomes more obvious in the second part that Ellington is developing prior material from the piece and elaborating elements of his compositional voice. The short piano cadenzas continue to “call” or direct the music into different sections as if the piece were improvised. The soloists help define various sections of the piece by their instrumental timbre, and Ellington, like a master drummer of a traditional West African music ensemble, shapes the piece by redirecting the mood with interrupting cadenzas. This connection between timbre and form is very important in this piece and in Ellington’s music generally, and Creole Rhapsody is an important example of his efforts to develop jazz within the tradition of African-American music.

Ellington clearly states his objectives as a composer in the important essay “The Duke Steps Out,” published in 1931 in Rhythm, a British magazine. The trajectory of his artistic vision seems to stem from ideas and opinions expressed in this essay, which articulates his approach to composition and a musical vision rooted in originality.

While Ellington generally did not attack or belittle the work of other musicians, he was aware early in his career of the qualitative difference between his compositional goals and the general field of popular music in the early 1930s. Continuing Scott Joplin’s and James Reese Europe’s legacy of innovation, Ellington was more concerned with defining African-American music through his art than with being pigeonholed by commercial expectations. Creole Rhapsody may have been the first extended work to literally break the conventional mold of recorded African-American music by requiring both sides of a 78 rpm disc, but this composition also revealed Ellington’s musical direction and concerns as stated in “The Duke Steps Out”:

Reminiscing in Tempo (henceforth referred to as RIT) was Duke Ellington’s first truly controversial composition. Composed after the devastating loss of his mother in 1935, RIT allowed Ellington to cope with this emotional nadir by placing his brooding thoughts in this composition. Reaching almost 13 minutes in length, RIT required four sides of two 78 rpm discs, exceeding the logistical requirements of Creole Rhapsody. RIT also broke the mold of aesthetic expectations of “jazz” music. Similar to Creole Rhapsody, RIT is not designed for dancing and is definitely meant for listening. RIT is not an example of Western classical art music collaborating with jazz, nor is it an example of a jazz composer collaborating with Western classical music. Creole Rhapsody could have been mistaken for a long jazz piece, but in writing RIT at 12′ 55′′, Ellington was clearly expanding a genre of African-American music within its own musical syntax and forms of expression. Four years after writing “Duke Steps Out,” Ellington created in RIT a non-foxtrot, non-32-bar, non-strict-tempo work of “serious music of the future.”

Musically, RIT is an example of Ellington’s mood/blue pieces where a melody seems to float over an ostinato accompaniment. The orchestral writing fits firmly within the aesthetics of big band arrangements, and the sections of the orchestra have their assigned roles. The rhythm section establishes the original ostinato, and then brass and wind instruments enter as soloists or as a soloing section. The opening muted trumpet solo is an alternating minor third over shifting parallel harmonies in the ostinato; in general terms, this is a blues riff without a blues progression. This melody can also be heard as a distillation of the important contribution of field hollers, cries, spirituals, blues, and gospel music to the tradition of African-American melody. Beginning RIT with the constructive material of a blues riff, Ellington firmly roots the work in the tradition of big band music and the African-American musical tradition. The use of instruments with fixed rhythmic elements against other instruments with changing rhythmic elements is fundamental to African-American musical expression.¹⁸

Development throughout the work comes from the changing combinations and timbres of the solo instruments. The music becomes most intense soon after the ninth minute of the piece, when the four-chord ostinato becomes a more complex dissonant chord against the moving woodwind countermelody and the riff melody. The organic growth of the piece is all intrinsic, similar to Ravel’s Bolero. What are missing, to those listeners expecting a conventional jazz recording, are the harmonic and formal signposts associated with the popular music of the time. Although the length of RIT is in itself significant as an expansion of standard recording practices, Ellington’s composition of a work outside the limitations of commercial popular music is more important. Ellington not only extended the duration of his individual works, but he also expanded the definition of African-American music.

Duke Ellington used his music to document African-American culture, and the titles of his works reveal a commitment to recording elements of African-American life. In his 1933 essay “My Hunt for Song Titles,” Ellington declared, “It will not, therefore, surprise the public to know that every one of my song titles is taken from, and naturally principally from, the life of Harlem.”¹⁹ Understood, but not stated in this quote, is that Harlem was the cultural center of African-American life in the 1930s. Harlem encompassed the diversity of African-American society, as reflected in Ellington’s music. The titles of his works also incorporated the African-American vernacular, including “dicty,” “jive,” “rent party,” and other words and phrases that were common to the denizens of Harlem. Similar to the titles of bebop songs in the 1940s and hip-hop songs of the 1980s, Ellington’s titles give an added stamp of cultural authenticity to his music. These titles also have a didactic quality by revealing to the general public unique elements of African-American culture. Teaching the world about African-American society was an important goal of Ellington’s work; he also stated in “My Hunt for Song Titles” that “it is through the medium of my music that I want to give you a better understanding of my race.”²⁰ And in “The Duke Steps Out” he wrote:

Although the didactic intent of his artistry seemed to be missed by many critics and some of his fans, Ellington’s nine-minute film Symphony in Black and his extended work Black, Brown and Beige were important ballasts to the imagery and import of the music of African-American artists. Released in 1935, Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life helped to cultivate a serious understanding of African-American music among the general public. The film presents four sections or movements, the traditional number of movements in a classical symphony, entitled “The Laborers,” “A Triangle,” “Hymn of Sorrow,” and “Harlem Rhythm.” Symphony in Black tells the history of African Americans through music as dictated by Ellington in “The Duke Steps Out.”

The first movement is an obvious documentation of the hardships African Americans endured during slavery. Reminding his public of the legacy of slavery and the mistreatment of African Americans in the United States, Ellington opens Symphony in Black with an example of one of the first documented forms of African-American folk music: the work song. The second movement eventually reveals a blues performed by Billie Holiday. As one of the most important genres of the African-American musical tradition, the classic blues, as performed by Holiday in “A Triangle,” also symbolically represents the great migration of African Americans to northern urban centers. “Hymn of Sorrow” uses slow, melancholy music to support scenes of devout African Americans in church at prayer or listening to a sermon. This third movement of Symphony in Black pays homage to the centrality of the church in African-American culture.

The last movement, “Harlem Rhythm,” ends the rhapsody with music and images associated with what could be scenes from a revue at the Cotton Club. The Ellington orchestra’s tenure at the Cotton Club represented the epitome of the new artistic developments in African-American music that inspired pilgrimages to Harlem by white jazz enthusiasts living in other parts of New York City, and the film ends with music evoking these exciting advancements.

Duke Ellington did not direct the filming of Symphony in Black, but the images of African Americans in general, and Ellington specifically, are culturally significant for 1935. A year later, the Warner Brothers film The Green Pastures was released, depicting “a story of heaven and of earth as it might be imagined by a very simple, devout people,” according to the trailer. Presenting a common, patronizing view of African Americans as simple folk with a confused understanding of the world and heaven, The Green Pastures promoted the popular stereotypes of black life in America. In stark contrast to The Green Pastures and similar depictions of African Americans, Symphony in Black begins with Duke Ellington composing a new commissioned work at a piano in his studio. After writing down his music, he then performs it. We see him thinking about his work in a reflective manner. This is an uncommon treatment for any African American on the silver screen in the 1930s. Eight years after the release of The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson in blackface, Duke Ellington is represented as an authentic recorder of the history of his race in America in Symphony in Black.

The culmination of Ellington’s musical historiography of African-American culture is the monumental composition Black, Brown and Beige, premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1943. The title alone reveals a desire by Ellington to write music that represents all people of African descent, regardless of their hue. Black, Brown and Beige, which Ellington subtitled A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America, presents a history of African Americans, but in more detail than Symphony in Black. Ellington announces each of the three movements in the live Carnegie Hall recording to give a detailed description of the music. “Black” starts with a work song, similar to Symphony in Black’s beginning, but Ellington here also includes a spiritual section to round out the important forms of African-American music before the end of slavery. The second movement, “Brown,” represents the migration of West Indians into the African-American community, emancipation, and the development of the blues in response to continued hardships. Ellington’s description of the last movement, “Beige,” balances a fine line between patriotism and suffering in the African-American community. The revolutionary moment in the piece, one might say, occurs in Ellington’s discussion of the suffering in the last movement. Ellington proclaimed from the stage:

Rich in history and complicated social and political debates, Ellington’s eloquent introduction to “Beige” is a soliloquy parallel to his music in general, and Black, Brown and Beige specifically. Ellington also makes an important connection between his orchestra and the plight of all African Americans – or, as he put it, the people backing him and his band members. In other words, the “Maestro” is telling the audience that if you support our music-making, then you need to know that we are no different than our families and loved ones who struggle and work hard to make sure that the next generation receives a good education. Or, even more poignantly, Ellington seems to be saying, “We, the Black, Brown, and Beige community, are not shiftless or lazy, but are focused on improving our future through education and hard work, while continuing to help defend America in every war, despite social and institutional barriers to our progress.”

Ellington’s final statement on Black, Brown and Beige summarizes the ideas and goals of the piece, without literally describing the musical organization of this movement, thereby enabling the musical experience of the work itself to achieve his artistic objective of expressing “an authentic record of my race written by a member of it.”